5 ms·

Paul Romer's "Charter Cities"

27 points by kingkawn 17y ago

biohacker42 17y ago
This is profoundly silly, only very intelligent people can be this silly. Q. What makes you confident that land and a good charter are all it takes? His answer is long but it boils down to Because! My god, if only it were that easy to create competition among governments, if only it were that easy to create the peace and stability necessary for economic growth. If only you could just convince Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to give a chunk of land and let you administer it for everybody's benefit. This is a variation on the underpants gnomes' strategy. But instead of step 2, step 1 is missing. Step 1. ???? Step 2. A safe piece of land with attractive legal and/or physical infrastructure. Step 3. Profit.
- barry-cotter 17y ago
  Eh, I agree on the low likelihood but I think the massive value creation from a success renders the expected value high enough for it to be worth campaigning for. The problem of binding a sovereign is very real whether the titular sovereign (whoever, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba) or the world-sovereign (the US, obviously) to their stated policy is, ah, rather difficult. Also, Dubai. Not shining bright at the moment but really 30 years ago there was practically nothing there and it hardly has Western standard rule of law even now, but look at what's there. One way of setting this up I could see would be some country with massive illegal immigration problems setting up an SEZ without freedom of movement to the metropole, and allowing free immigration to that along with some very minimal law enforcment. I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years. I think you overestimate the difficulty of physical infrastructure, that's a solved problem, throw money at it.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years. What if the result winds up looking less like New York or Hong Kong and more like Mogadishu? There are no guarantees that this bold social experiment might not wind up going wrong in all sorts of ways. What will Greece do if it finds it suddenly has an impoverished crime-ridden city on its sovereign territory?
    - barry-cotter 17y ago
      Deport everybody. Or just leave it there. Mogadishu/Somalia isn't even that destabilising to East Africa which mostly has more or less functional states. Also, the only reason Somalia doesn't have a stable internationally recognised government at the moment is that the US has a hate on for Islamists of any stripe. If they hadn't put so much effort into the puppet Transitional Government and the invasion of Somalia by their Ethiopian client Somalia (possibly absent Puntland, probably absent Somaliland) would no longer be a failed state, it would just be a really shit one. Seriously, imagine the Cosa Nostra take over the running of AgeanManhattan, protection rackets and all. Now, what do you call them? The government. They're a subsidiary government of Greece, which holds ultimate, internationally recognised sovereignty over AgMan, but whosoever holds the monopoly over the use of force is thus legitimate and sovereign. Also, seriously Greece is not a terribly impressive first world country but it is one. I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided. Also, these people wouldn't be citizens, they'd be guests/subjects. No vote, no political power, no constituency. The Greek police don't play very nice with Greeks. I imagine the Greek Army would be nastier. (Leaving to go to bed, will reply to any reply tomorrow, hoping there's a discussion here when I get back, ciao)
      - 17y ago
ableal 17y ago
Think about the truly important changes in political systems. Back in the middle ages, suppose that someone described a legal system that enforced rules and contracts that everyone had to obey, even the country’s leaders. What would informed opinion of the day have been? Great idea, but it will never happen. No question it was hard to pull off, but it did happen. The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question the quality of the "informed opinion" ...
barry-cotter 17y ago
An incredibly long, well reasoned and cited, highly vitriolic and personally insulting to Romer take on the "charter city" idea. (Really, I'm not kidding it is incredibly long.) Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...
- chasingsparks 17y ago
  Wow. You were not exaggerating -- this is insanely long for a blog post. Thanks for giving me something entertaining to do for the next two hours at work.
- chasingsparks 17y ago
  I just finished reading this post. If you enjoy H.L. Mencken, you will enjoy this guys blog post.
- mr_luc 17y ago
  I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc. When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article becomes readable. But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<-- new word) Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh. The guy writes like a crank. But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him than not.
  - llimllib 17y ago
    > Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into [falsehoods] This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading. It's important to read him critically.
- 17y ago
javert 17y ago
I loved this. Don't understand why all the other top-level comments are so negative.

27 points by kingkawn 17y ago

This is profoundly silly, only very intelligent people can be this silly. Q. What makes you confident that land and a good charter are all it takes? His answer is long but it boils down to Because! My god, if only it were that easy to create competition among governments, if only it were that easy to create the peace and stability necessary for economic growth. If only you could just convince Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to give a chunk of land and let you administer it for everybody's benefit. This is a variation on the underpants gnomes' strategy. But instead of step 2, step 1 is missing. Step 1. ???? Step 2. A safe piece of land with attractive legal and/or physical infrastructure. Step 3. Profit.

barry-cotter 17y ago
Eh, I agree on the low likelihood but I think the massive value creation from a success renders the expected value high enough for it to be worth campaigning for. The problem of binding a sovereign is very real whether the titular sovereign (whoever, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba) or the world-sovereign (the US, obviously) to their stated policy is, ah, rather difficult. Also, Dubai. Not shining bright at the moment but really 30 years ago there was practically nothing there and it hardly has Western standard rule of law even now, but look at what's there. One way of setting this up I could see would be some country with massive illegal immigration problems setting up an SEZ without freedom of movement to the metropole, and allowing free immigration to that along with some very minimal law enforcment. I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years. I think you overestimate the difficulty of physical infrastructure, that's a solved problem, throw money at it.
- hughprime 17y ago
  I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years. What if the result winds up looking less like New York or Hong Kong and more like Mogadishu? There are no guarantees that this bold social experiment might not wind up going wrong in all sorts of ways. What will Greece do if it finds it suddenly has an impoverished crime-ridden city on its sovereign territory?
  - barry-cotter 17y ago
    Deport everybody. Or just leave it there. Mogadishu/Somalia isn't even that destabilising to East Africa which mostly has more or less functional states. Also, the only reason Somalia doesn't have a stable internationally recognised government at the moment is that the US has a hate on for Islamists of any stripe. If they hadn't put so much effort into the puppet Transitional Government and the invasion of Somalia by their Ethiopian client Somalia (possibly absent Puntland, probably absent Somaliland) would no longer be a failed state, it would just be a really shit one. Seriously, imagine the Cosa Nostra take over the running of AgeanManhattan, protection rackets and all. Now, what do you call them? The government. They're a subsidiary government of Greece, which holds ultimate, internationally recognised sovereignty over AgMan, but whosoever holds the monopoly over the use of force is thus legitimate and sovereign. Also, seriously Greece is not a terribly impressive first world country but it is one. I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided. Also, these people wouldn't be citizens, they'd be guests/subjects. No vote, no political power, no constituency. The Greek police don't play very nice with Greeks. I imagine the Greek Army would be nastier. (Leaving to go to bed, will reply to any reply tomorrow, hoping there's a discussion here when I get back, ciao)
    - 17y ago

ableal 17y ago

Think about the truly important changes in political systems. Back in the middle ages, suppose that someone described a legal system that enforced rules and contracts that everyone had to obey, even the country’s leaders. What would informed opinion of the day have been? Great idea, but it will never happen. No question it was hard to pull off, but it did happen. The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question the quality of the "informed opinion" ...

barry-cotter 17y ago

An incredibly long, well reasoned and cited, highly vitriolic and personally insulting to Romer take on the "charter city" idea. (Really, I'm not kidding it is incredibly long.) Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...

chasingsparks 17y ago
Wow. You were not exaggerating -- this is insanely long for a blog post. Thanks for giving me something entertaining to do for the next two hours at work.
chasingsparks 17y ago
I just finished reading this post. If you enjoy H.L. Mencken, you will enjoy this guys blog post.
mr_luc 17y ago
I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc. When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article becomes readable. But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<-- new word) Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh. The guy writes like a crank. But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him than not.
- llimllib 17y ago
  > Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into [falsehoods] This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading. It's important to read him critically.
17y ago

javert 17y ago

I loved this. Don't understand why all the other top-level comments are so negative.